Can't Get No
DC/Vertigo
We're nearing the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks; is it still too soon for comic books about them?
I'd say so, at least based on writer/artist Rick Veitch's epic graphic novel Can't Get No. Comics started responding to the attacks almost immediately, of course, but the first round of works, from the many benefits books to Art Spiegelman's strange In the Shadows of No Towers, were mere gut reactions—short, sad, angry, confused.
Veitch's graphic novel—and it's earned that title more than many of the books that bear it—is the opposite in every way. He's had the time and distance to think about the event, develop a point of view and draw more than 350 pages about it.
Veitch explores the effects the shock of the attack had, the psychic sinkhole it made in the American collective conscious, but he uses it as an event within an entirely fictional story about a fictional everyman, and the tactic occasionally seems a little cheap, even crass. If you want to evoke an immediate emotional reaction in your audience, all you need to do is draw a plane heading for a building.
But Can't Get No is not an easy work to write off—or to digest—and not simply because of its 9/11 connections. The story, told entirely in silent pictures, is of the odyssey of one Chad Roe, a wealthy suit-and-tie type in the permanent-marker business.
When his company, Eter-No Mark, is sued for billions because of the product's use in graffiti, a devastated Roe spends a night mixing anxiety medicine and booze. Two art girls use his own markers to decorate his unconscious body in a head-to-toe tattoo.
Literally a marked man, he's all but laughed out of his old life in New York, then the planes hit and he and the reader are plunged into a powerfully charged road trip from the beaches of New Jersey to a strange theme park rave to a Burning Man-like desert party. Roe seems to be searching for a new life, and Vietch for the meaning of life, but what follows is mostly a lot of drugs, sex and some violent encounters with Roe's fellow Americans—it's like a vision quest for a white, modern businessman. searching for the meaning of life.
Veitch's incredible black-and-white art tells the story perfectly well without traditional dialogue or narration. But Veitch includes narration boxes filled with stream-of-conscious prose that doesn't pertain to the action and is so vague it's hard to tell what it's about at all. Comics by definition are words and pictures working together, but here they're at cross-purposes. It's a shame, because the story the art seems to tell is a highly emotional mythologizing of today's headlines, and the prose functions more as white noise, interfering with the signal. If you can manage to tune out the latter, the former stands on its own just fine.
The Escapists No. 1
Dark Horse
While a lot of people loved Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the golden-age comic-book industry, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, comics creators and readers loved it even more.
Chabon's fictional superhero, The Escapist, who was created by the title characters of his novel, has gone on to become a real superhero in comics published by Dark Horse and, with this new miniseries by Brian K. Vaughan, the Escapist and his faux history gain another level of metafictional, cross-medium pseudoreality.
Essentially a comic book sequel to Chabon's prose novel, The Escapists is set in the present, in which Kavalier and Clay's creation is all but forgotten by everyone, except one young, wannabe comic book writer from Cleveland.
Using his inheritance to buy the rights to the Escapist character, he enlists a friend with excellent handwriting and a cute artist he rescued from an elevator to help him make The Escapist a best-selling comic again.
Vaughan, like Chabon, targets his book toward a general audience, but packs it with tidbits for the comic geeks. It's a wonderful example of art imitating life imitating previous art that imitated lives dedicated to the creation of art. Or something like that.